Relationships are built on trust and mutual understanding – if a company wants customers to trust them with their data, the company must foster that trust. Data governance and sensitivity about your customers’ data must be enforced internally and communicated externally – to your customers.

When aggregating sales and marketing data, marketers, who want to leverage this information, should also be involved in the setting standards for data governance. For instance, insurance marketing data is often shared with the brokers and agents through various reports and tools. To prevent any external, non-discretionary use of customer data,it is important to implement best practice for sharing. The table below provides a broad stroke of which data categories and suggests distribution policies for groups of users of the data.

Digging down deeper:

Depending on the relationship the insurance carriers have with their brokers, the marketing team can predetermine buckets of CRM, Sensitive, or Predictive Scoring data so the brokers, for example, can analyze prospect and customers to determine correct coverage levels for the customer. Consider this scenario: for good reason, marketers will not share all of their predictive scoring and segmentation data with captive agents. However, if the marketing team has identified a group of customers who are categorized as frequently late in premium payments, that group of customers can be shared with captive agents so they can take action. Applicable actions in this situation can include sending friendly email reminders or providing payment options before the person is late. In other situations, marketers, with access to information that is not shared with agents or brokers, may be enabled to manually grant temporary, limited access to agents/brokers.

Of course all data should be considered sensitive and must be governed by a specialized team, as any misuse of sensitive data would likely be detrimental to the overall brand. However, if markets are part of the data governance teams, they will be both more responsible data users and data monitors.